The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  She hit the connect and read the text: Hi. Tommy.

  Tommy Crawford? He was the only Tommy she knew. Hi, she texted back.

  ’Sup?

  Hmwk, she typed into the phone.

  The screen went black. A few seconds later, her phone buzzed against her palm. This time when she hit connect, she removed her earphones and pressed the phone to her ear. “What homework?” Tommy asked.

  “Martin Luther King.”

  “I hear he had a dream,” Tommy said.

  I have a dream, too, Elyse thought. I have a dream that my parents would shut up and that my mother wouldn’t be such a bitch, and she’d stop borrowing my clothes without asking me, and my father wouldn’t be such a wimp, and Katie wouldn’t leave the bathroom a mess all the time, and April would be alive so I could call her and whine to her and she’d cheer me up.

  What she said was, “Which section of U.S. history are you in?”

  “Third period. Ms. Mahoney. She sucks.”

  April had been in Ms. Mahoney’s homeroom. After the accident, Ms. Mahoney had snagged Elyse in the hall, curling her talon-like fingers around Elyse’s upper arm and bleating, in her painfully nasal voice, “I know you and April Walden were friends. I’m so sorry, dear.”

  Elyse had wanted to say, “I’m not your dear. Get your fucking hand off me.” But she’d only nodded and mumbled something, and Ms. Mahoney had released her.

  “She smells like mothballs,” Elyse said now.

  “Is that what that smell is? I always thought she smelled like my grandmother’s attic.”

  “Your grandmother’s attic smells like mothballs,” Elyse told him.

  Now what? Silence breathed through her phone, and then the shudder of a door slamming downstairs. Good. One of her parents had gone into another room. Probably her father, into the room he called his office, although he didn’t really need an office at home. It was a small room partitioned off the den, filled with his books and an old computer. And probably a supply of something alcoholic. Her mother drank only wine—there was always a bottle in the fridge—and her father drank whatever he had stashed in his office. Rarely did they drink together. They retreated to their corners, filled their veins with booze, and then came out fighting. That was the usual pattern, unless her mother left the house.

  “My parents drink too much,” she said into the phone. She wasn’t sure why she mentioned this, except that that was what she was thinking and Tommy was probably expecting her to say something.

  “So do mine,” he said, as if her comment had been perfectly ordinary. “Irish whisky. You ever taste that shit? It tastes like embalming fluid.”

  “Have you tasted embalming fluid?” Elyse asked, surprised that she could talk about this so easily with a guy she hardly knew, and even make a sort-of joke.

  “Okay. It tastes like Drano. No, I never tasted Drano, either.” He laughed.

  “Honestly. Someday I’m going to walk out of this house and never look back.”

  “Yeah.” He said nothing for a minute. “Thanks for telling me about April.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I wish I’d known.”

  “Would you have asked her out?”

  He laughed again. “How do I know?” He sounded solemn when he added, “She seemed nice. Nicer than the girls I hang out with. They’re all, you know.”

  Elyse wasn’t sure she knew. She wasn’t even sure who he hung out with. But she didn’t question him.

  “They act stupid,” he elaborated. “April never acted stupid. You never act stupid, either.”

  “Ha.”

  “No. You don’t. I mean, not do something stupid but just act as if you never had a serious thought in your head.”

  “I have too many serious thoughts,” Elyse said. “Maybe I should act more stupid.”

  “No.” He said it with such emphasis, she could almost believe he cared. “Okay, gotta go.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, although his abruptness startled her. It startled her even more when she realized he’d already disconnected. Asshole, she thought, although his joke about not drinking Drano had made her smile.

  Regina Spektor’s voice leaked through the ear-cups of her headphones, a thin, tinny sound. And then another sound, of Elyse’s bedroom door opening. She braced herself for her mother’s invasion—her father would have knocked—and prepared herself to answer no to whatever her mother asked.

  But the person on the other side of the threshold was Katie. She entered Elyse’s bedroom, wide-eyed and miserable looking. She was going through an ugly stage. Her waist was too thick, her breasts looked like fat hives pressing into the cotton of her T-shirt, her knees hinged too far backward when she straightened her legs, her hair was stringy, and her teeth were partially obscured by braces. For some stupid reason, she’d chosen multicolored hooks for her teeth, and the array of colors connected by a gleaming silver wire made her mouth look like a ride at a low-rent amusement park.

  Their mother said Katie was at an awkward stage. Elyse hoped, for Katie’s sake, that the stage would end soon. Was two years too long to qualify as a stage?

  She thought about yelling at Katie for entering her room without first knocking, but Katie looked so distraught, Elyse cut her a break. “What?”

  “I hate when Mom and Dad fight like that.”

  “Yeah, well.” Elyse shrugged. She hated it, too, but there wasn’t much she or Katie could do about it.

  “Do you know what they’re fighting about?”

  Yes, Elyse thought, but she didn’t say it. She’d figured it out. Some inklings in the past few months, and then, after April died, it all seemed so obvious. Like April’s death had jarred Elyse so much her vision had cleared. What was that biblical line about the scales falling from someone’s eyes?

  Katie didn’t need to know, though. She was young. She was in an awkward stage. She had enough crap in her life. “They were probably drinking,” Elyse said. “You know how they get when they drink.”

  “I’m never going to drink,” Katie said. “Ever.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Tasha says her parents never fight,” Katie said.

  Tasha was a geek. Whenever she came over, she and Katie would plow through the Oreos, and Tasha would always suck off the cream and leave the cookies lying around, all soggy with her spit. And she giggled every time she saw Elyse, as if there was something inherently funny about her. So what if Tasha’s parents never fought? They’d given their daughter a dog’s name, not a human’s. Why couldn’t Katie have friends with normal names? Tiffany. Tasha. Honestly.

  “All parents fight,” Elyse assured her sister. “Some are just quieter about it.”

  “I wish our parents were quieter.”

  “So do I.” Elyse became aware of the quiet surrounding her. Music no longer leaked out of her headphones. Doors no longer banged downstairs. Maybe her father was polishing off a bottle of Jim Beam. Maybe her mother had left the house.

  What did it matter? What did anything matter? You could have perfect parents, parents who never screamed and who drank in moderation and who were totally devoted to each other, and who never borrowed their daughters’ apparel without asking, and who respected each other and were affectionate and belonged to the Unitarian Church, where the minister preached about love instead of about sin, and then you could chase a tennis ball into the road and get hit by a car and die. What did it matter?

  “I have to finish my history paper,” Elyse said, even though it was already finished. She felt bad for Katie, felt bad for her too-thick eyebrows and her undefined cheeks and her foolish belief that if you didn’t drink, everything would be all right. But right now Elyse needed to be alone. Hating her parents was easier when she was alone. Hating her parents and hating a guy who could be kind of charming and frie
ndly and then suddenly hang up on you and hating the world in general for stealing your best friend. She turned back to her desk, hoping Katie didn’t see the hate burning inside her but not really caring too much if she did.

  With a damp sigh, Katie shuffled out of Elyse’s bedroom.

  Elyse stared at her laptop monitor. When Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, he wasn’t talking about an actual dream. He used the word dream as a rhetorical device. What he was really talking about was the better future he wanted his followers to strive for.

  Maybe if you believed the future could get better, that was a dream.

  Or maybe it just meant you were stupid.

  Chapter Twelve

  PEOPLE NEEDED ritual in their lives. They needed order. Just because a person wasn’t religious didn’t mean she found no value in symbolic gestures. Just because she didn’t believe in God didn’t mean she didn’t believe in anything.

  Just because people had certain expectations about Becky didn’t mean she couldn’t defy those expectations.

  Yes, she was logical. Yes, she was smart. Beck the Brain, she thought, smiling faintly as she strode up the incline of Baker’s Hill Road, Elyse and Florie trailing behind her. The afternoon was warm; humidity blurred the air. Sweat gathered along her left shoulder under the padded strap of her backpack. She switched the pack to her right shoulder. She supposed she could wear the pack the way it was intended, with one strap on each shoulder and the sagging weight balanced against her back, but no one wore their packs that way. Not even brains like Beck.

  Behind her, Florie’s voice fluttered like a mourning dove’s, high and cooing. Becky could slow her pace and walk with them, but she had two reasons not to. One was that walking two abreast on the winding two-lane road was dangerous enough; three abreast would force one of them to jut out into the road, and then a car might come along, and that might lead to catastrophe. The other was that she didn’t want to talk. She wanted to empty her mind, to delete all the scribbles of the school day, the clamor of her classmates, the chorus teacher’s meltdown about the first sopranos’ tendency to sing flat, the mind-numbing English homework she’d received that would chew up her weekend: an essay on The Waste Land.

  Hurry up, please, it’s time, she thought, then shook her head, shedding the poem like a dog ridding its fur of water after emerging from a pond.

  The tree loomed ahead, its leaves unfurled into a ruby-hued canopy. Just seeing it filled Becky with an inexplicable peace. Shantih, shantih, shantih. The peace that passeth understanding.

  No. No Waste Land. Not here. This tree was not a wasteland. It was holy. It was sacred. It was the April tree.

  Since the sunlight was muted by the summery haze, the shadow beneath the tree wasn’t particularly pronounced. Becky eased her pack off her shoulder and lowered it gently to the ground. By the time Florie and Elyse joined her, she had it unzipped. Florie looked giddy, her cheeks pink, the hair edging her face damp with sweat and tightening into springy curls. Elyse looked sullen and wary. Last night she’d phoned Becky and said her mother was having an affair. Becky had misunderstood her at first and thought Elyse was saying Becky’s mother was having an affair, which was of course preposterous. The only way Becky’s mother would ever have an affair was if Becky’s father was also having an affair, and they were having it together, with each other.

  “My mother,” Elyse had clarified. “I’ve sort of been suspecting it for a while, but I kept telling myself not to believe it. But you see something right in front of you, it’s hard not to believe it.”

  “You saw her having the affair?”

  Elyse had snorted. “You know what I mean. The way she acts. The way she fights with my father. The thing that really pisses me off is that she’s always borrowing my clothes, and then I think, she wore my sweater or my skirt when she was fucking some guy, whoever he is, and it just grosses me out. Like I want to burn the sweater or skirt. I sure don’t want to wear it again. It’s tainted.”

  “Does your father know?” Becky had asked. Clothing had never mattered much to her. Logistics did.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. They fight all the time, anyway.”

  “Maybe your mother is having an affair so she can have sex with someone she isn’t fighting with all the time,” Becky had suggested.

  “Or maybe she’s just a selfish bitch,” Elyse had said.

  Becky supposed she ought to feel sorry for Elyse. But that drama belonged to Elyse’s parents, not Elyse. Parents could be silly, they could be weird, they could be clueless. They could borrow your clothes or knock themselves out trying to make you smile when you really, truly didn’t want to smile. But they couldn’t keep your best friend from dying. So really, how important were they?

  “It’s creepy being here,” Elyse said, glancing around.

  “I haven’t been here since . . . ” Florie sighed. “That day.” She set her backpack down next to Becky’s.

  Becky pointedly lifted Florie’s pack and carried it beyond what she considered the sacred perimeter, the area where April had lain, where if she’d been conscious at all, this was what she would have seen. Not exactly this, of course. The leaves she would have viewed hadn’t spread fully open yet, and the sky had been much bluer than it was today, and the grass newer, a dark, dewy green. It was inside the sacred perimeter that April’s spirit could be felt, and once Becky had removed what she needed from her own backpack, she would set it off to the side with Florie’s.

  Elyse didn’t need to be told. She slid her pack off her shoulder and dropped it next to where Becky had placed Florie’s pack.

  Becky unpacked the candle. It was enclosed inside a glass, a Jewish shiva candle her father had received from his brother when their father had died. Becky’s father hadn’t wanted to sit shiva—they’d all spent one evening at her Uncle Steve’s house, the day of the funeral. Uncle Steve had pressed this candle into Becky’s father’s hand and said, “Light it at home. You can do that much for Dad.”

  On the drive home, Becky’s father had muttered that he’d be damned if Steve was going to tell him what he should do for Dad, and Becky had wondered whether, by not sitting shiva for a week, her father would indeed be damned. When they got home, he’d stashed the candle in a cabinet in the dining room hutch and never used it. He’d mentioned it to Becky after April died, but at the time she hadn’t figured out what sort of ritual she needed, what would be right for April.

  Becky’s grandfather had died two and a half years ago. Becky had found the candle where her father had left it then, hidden behind a tarnished silver tray and some cut-glass condiment bowls at the rear of the hutch shelf. Its wick was a virginal white, the tall glass enclosing it tinted blue, with a gold Star of David etched onto the surface. The candle was designed to burn for seven days, but that assumed you burned it day and night and never blew it out.

  Since Becky burned it only when she was at the tree, and for only a few minutes at a time, she expected that it would last a while. By the time the wax had melted into vapor, maybe her grandmother would have died and her father would get another shiva candle from Uncle Steve. Grandma Zinn was a whiny old lady—Becky’s father was the youngest of his siblings, and his mother was already well into her eighties. Walking across a room caused her to wheeze, and you had to shout at her because she was hard of hearing, and once she finally heard you she would complain, “What are you shouting for?” Becky would not be shocked if a new shiva candle turned up in her house in the not-too-distant future.

  And if her Grandma Zinn surprised everyone and lived to be a hundred, Becky would scare up a different candle. An elegant taper, or a scented candle, or one of those small round white ones that could float in a dish of water. Maybe April would enjoy the variety.

  Along with the candle, Becky pulled a bottle of water, a zip-lock plastic bag of grass seed and a butane lighter.
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br />   “You had that in school?” Florie asked, aghast. “A lighter? They’re banned.”

  Becky shrugged. “No one searched my bag.” No one would. She was Beck the Brain, who never got in trouble, mostly because people assumed she was too smart to break rules. It was a foolish assumption; the smarter you were, the more likely you would realize how inane the rules were, and the easier it was for you to break them. But unless you were ridiculously flagrant, being an honors student immunized you against getting caught.

  “What’s this?” Elyse asked, fingering the plastic bag.

  “It’s grass seed. Every time I come here, I plant a few seeds. See all these dirt patches?” Becky pointed out the bare patches of dusty brown surrounding the bulging roots and at the base of the red maple’s trunk. Not much sun reached those patches of earth, but the notion that April had died on dirt instead of grass troubled Becky. She wanted a smooth, green carpet where April had been. She wanted something soft and alive and growing.

  Elyse looked intrigued, Florie anxious. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

  “Touch the tree,” Becky told her as she balanced the candle over the spot where she’d buried the cigarette butts the day of April’s memorial service. With a quiet click of her lighter, she ignited the wick. Then she straightened up and molded her palm to the curve of the tree’s trunk. She had come here and done these things enough times that they felt like a habit to her. Lighting the candle was the first step. Touching the tree was the next. The recitation came after that. Each step was essential, imbued with a significance she felt but couldn’t explain.

  Elyse moved beside her and stroked her fingertips against the tree trunk. Her nails were painted a deep, bloody red, one shade darker than the leaves above them.

  Becky gazed down at the small white flame inside the glass. “April, April died in May,” she intoned. “April, April went away. Disappeared one sunny day. Underneath this tree she lay.”

  Elyse gave Becky an uncertain look. Florie mumbled, “That’s better than T. S. Eliot.”